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Antisocial Media

I’m an old man and modern technology confuses and frightens
me. I can’t be doing with all this MyTube and YouBook and FaceSpace. We didn’t
have any of that in my day. And the really frightening thing here is that I’m
not that old - I’m still technically in my early forties for the next couple of
weeks. So my day wasn’t too long ago. And yet everything has changed,
especially in the field where I have made what little mark I can claim in this
life, that of writing toot about dodgy horror and sci-fi films.

The reason for this cyber-introspection is that my main
website, www.mjsimpson.co.uk (yep, spent a lot of time picking that URL) has
come to the end of its useful life. Eleven years ago, back in January 2002,
a tech-savvy mate showed me how to
purchase a web address and some hosting stuff and he built for me a site that
allowed me to post interviews, news and reviews. It was pretty basic stuff. If
you take a look at archive.org you can see it for yourself.

I’m not claiming by any means that mine was the first
website devoted to what I billed as "cult movies and the people who make them”,
but you know, it was pretty on the ball and predates a lot of the sites you
probably look at now, while many of the other cult movie sites from those antediluvian
days have long since vanished. The world wide web has only been around for just
over 20 years, and I’ve been online for more than half that time - holy cow!

It was back in the 1990s that I first encountered the
internet, just a handful of years after Tim Berners-Lee decided to see what
would happen if he tried hitting control, alt and delete at the same time and
magically invented the web. In the June 1996 issues of SFX, we ran a feature on
‘science fiction on the net’. That was how new it all was. It was six pages
long and within that we were able to cover pretty much all the significant
websites featuring Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, movies, TV shows, comics
and SF literature. What a tiny, tiny world cyberspace was back then.

Future Publishing, despite having carved its niche by
selling computer game magazines to nerds, and despite publishing .net, the UK’s
bestselling magazine about the internet (which does really emphasise how
primitive everything was), nevertheless still didn’t fully embrace the new era
of online-ness. There was a bizarre rule that no more than two staff per
magazine were allowed web access, usually the Editor and the Production Editor.
We didn’t even all have e-mail addresses.

Gradually, oh so gradually, the SFX crew dipped its toes
into the online waters, initially with a pretty basic website that didn’t
really do very much except say ‘buy our lovely magazine’. Actually before that,
the belief among our peers was that the future lay with... CD-ROMs. Oh, you
kids today probably don’t even remember CD-ROMs. They were quite the mode in
the mid-to-late 1990s, mainly because they offered considerably more
interaction and certainly better graphics than anything you could find on the
web. A CD-ROM was basically sort of like a website, except that it was on a
shiny disc and you had to put it into your computer. And it might have
information, or video clips, or a game, or a load of text or photos or
whatever. And you could file it in your CD rack. And never look at it again.

Now, Future Publishing at the time was owned by a FTSE 100
company called Pearson, whose CEO was a lady named Marjorie Scardino. I remember her because there was a charming little kids fantasy film which I was
sent to review called The Indian in the Cupboard. Directed by Frank Oz, as I
recall without bothering to look it up, and an early big-screen role for Steve
Coogan. Basically a kid’s magic cupboard brought his toys to life, except that
once living they were real people from real times, so his toy ‘Red Indian’
figure became a real, if tiny, Native America who found himself magically
transported to a big, wooden house where he was gazed on by a giant
eight-year-old. Coogan played a British Tommy, formerly a toy soldier, and
there was a brief but memorable scene where multi-toy experimentation led to a
fleeting shot of Darth Vader battling a T rex.

The reason I remember The Indian in the Cupboard so well,
despite not having seen it for the best part of two decades, is that the lead
actor was a boy named Hal Scardino. And I did a bit of digging (possibly on the
new-fangled internet) and confirmed that he was actually the son of the Pearson
CEO. So I rather cheekily sent a letter to Pearson HQ asking a woman who earned
about 10,000 times my salary if I could interview her little boy about his
film. And what do you know, she rang the office and put her son on the phone
and I talked with the lad (who is probably about 30 by now, quite probably
already earning more than me) and we ran it in the magazine. I was rather proud
of my initiative.

So anyway, Marjorie Scardino ran Pearson and one of the
other parts of Pearson, which was all into interactive things, decided that the
future was not just CD-ROMs, it was magazines on CD-ROM. It wasn’t unknown for
magazines to have a free CD-ROM as a ‘cover-mount’. Although those were the
days when it was still possible to get away with cover-mounting an audio
cassette. Actually no, you couldn’t get away with that and we all felt pretty
embarrassed at SFX when our cover-mount was an audio interview with Jon Pertwee
on cassette tape because Future were too stingy to cough up for a CD. But no,
Pearson Interactive wanted to turn this idea around so that the CD-ROM itself
would be the magazine, with all the content you expect, but added stuff like
video and audio and games.

And which of Future’s many titles did they choose for this
grand experiment? SFX, of course. Because our reader survey showed that about
45% of our subscribers had a CD-ROM drive (remember, this was the era of floppy
disks). I mean, they could have picked, just for example, a mag along the
corridor called CD-ROM Today, 100% of whose subscribers had a CD-ROM drive, but
that was presumably too obvious. Thus it was that my colleagues and I found
ourselves freelancing for a thing called SFX-CD, with the same logo as our mag
but otherwise unrelated, which was a quite spectacular failure. I think it
lasted four ‘issues’. Partly it failed because of hopeless interactivity, a
user-unfriendly interface which required lots of random clicking on things to
navigate around. We sometimes couldn’t find stuff that we knew was on there
because there was no index, the design being based on that classic idiocy 'people will enjoy exploring it'. No they won’t.

In order to be sold like a magazine in WH Smith, the disc
had to be mounted in a bubble pack on a sheet of stiff card the size of a
magazine. This also enabled the packaging to give some clue as to the contents,
but ‘some clue’ is the operative phrase here. There was no proper contents list
on the card, just as there was no proper index on the disc. So people were
being asked to spend lots of money on something with no idea what it contained.
And just as the final nail in the coffin, calling it SFX-CD and using the
actual SFX magazine logo meant that most of those 45% of subscribers who saw it
assumed, quite reasonably, that it was just a CD-ROM version of the magazine
they already received every month.

Really, the whole thing was just a pile of arse. It would be
nice to think that those SFX-CD discs are now some sort of collector’s items
because they did contain exclusive interviews and other content that would be
of interest to sci-fi collectors. But since there was no way to ever know what
was on there, I suspect not. I just tried googling for any mention of this
unloved stepchild and pretty much all I could find was a PDF scan of a
typewritten business document from 1997 reckoning that CD-ROM magazines are the
future (and mentioning in the footnotes that SFX-CD crashed the first time this
guy tried to run it - that was another flaw).

Which just emphasises that you can’t predict the future
(even if you work for a company called, um, Future). Predicting the future is a
mug’s game. No-one predicted, back when we were running magazine articles about
the web, how big and varied and detailed and utterly ubiquitous it would
become. No-one predicted things that rapidly became normal, we just adapted to
them and then assumed they had always been there. Take YouTube for instance
(and its slightly classier cousin Vimeo). That was launched in 2005, the same
year as Revenge of the Sith and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Isn’t that
sobering? The first three Harry Potter films (and maybe it’s my age but weren’t
they made, like, about year and a half
ago?) were released before it was possible to share videos online. People
watched their trailers online but in very basic forms, embedded into existing
websites.

No-one predicted MySpace or Facebook or Twitter or whatever
the latest thing is that everyone has started raving about since I began typing
February’s blog. But I’ll make a prediction. All these things are transient.
They will crumble and decay and disappear like Kubla Khan’s sacred pleasure
dome. At least Khan’s dome had a point, it wasn’t just a bunch of self-serving
bollocks. Because, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old git, all this
‘social media’ malarkey which bedevils the world generally - but particularly
the world of movie fans - is frippery. It offers innumerable ways of sharing
things but doesn’t actually create the things that are shared.

The world will always need content, whether it’s on a
website, between the pages of a magazine or scratched onto a cave wall (but
preferably not on a CD-ROM which didn’t even load properly in the first place).
That’s why I’ve been writing my website for the past decade and a bit: because
these horror and sci-fi films (and the people who make them) are interesting.
Interesting to write about and read about. I have now begun the
long process of transferring my content to a new site at
mjsimpson-films.blogspot.co.uk and that is giving me the opportunity to read
interviews and reviews which I haven’t seen in years. And frankly, I’m quite
enjoying them.

I am still on the ‘B’s but it’s a real treat to meet again
some of the people I have been lucky enough to interview: Hammer/Bond actress
Martine Beswick, followed by Working Title head honcho Tim Bevan, followed by
comedy star Sanjeev Bhaskar (talking about, among other things, the
BAFTA-nominated sci-fi short Inferno and Angell’s Hell, a never-seen fantasy TV
pilot), followed by UFO star Ed Bishop, followed by the first ever English
language interview with Uwe Boll (from 2000; many years later Empire reckoned they
had his first British interview but I had interviewed him twice by then). On
top of which, since I tend to obsessively re-read my own work when it’s
published, it’s nice to read with a fresh eye my old reviews that I haven’t
seen in a long time and re-acquaint myself with films I had long since
forgotten. You don’t get that level of permanency with social media, and that’s
why I can’t stand it and want nothing to do with it. Which was really what I
wanted to say in the first place. Stick that in 140 characters if you can.

MJ Simpson has been writing since he
found out which end of a pencil makes a mark. After editing sci-fan
club mags he spent three years on the staff of SFX and helped to launch
Total Film before switching to freelance work for Fangoria, Shivers,
Video Watchdog, DeathRay and other cult movie magazines. He
has a number of scripts in development and has been working on his
third book, a biography of 'Bride of Frankenstein' Elsa Lanchester, for a very long time, but he
promises to have it finished soon (-ish). Mike lives in Leicester
with his wife, Mrs S, and his young son, TF Simpson. By day he edits
the university's website and in the evenings he edits MJSimpson.co.uk.
He should probably get out more.